What's the best way to track your brand in social media? Tools to try

You can't turn around anymore without reading about social networks, hearing about them on TV, or seeing people Twittering while walking, driving, attending events or eating dinner.

How can you keep up with it all? How can you possibly keep track of who's saying what to and about whom? Do you need one service or 10? Will free services work, or do you need subscription services?

Here are some tools I use and recommend to help you keep track of your brand, your products, your industry, and even your social networks. There are new ones all the time, and I'll tell you about the ones I test as we go along. The best thing to do is to check out some of these and see which ones work best for what you want to know and do.

Social Mention - searches user-generated content and tracks mentions of your brand across top social media sources such as Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, social bookmarks, news, videos, and more. Like the other services, you can subscribe to your results by RSS or email.

Compete.com - (free and paid versions) analyzing what consumers do across the entire web, not just what they do within a particular site.

Marketers can use this rich information across the entire company, not just for online media planning or site design decisions. Compete Pro is the enterprise version.

Social Radar - (paid service) research and analysis of online buzz. Learn and analyze what people are saying about your company, products, industry.

Backtype - for monitoring blog comments mentioning your name.

Twitter search - increasingly relevant way to track any name or keyword or phrase. You can decide to tweet back or ignore it

Tweetmeme - tracks the most popular links tweeted to blogs, images, videos and audio

TweetBeep - will notify you by email about terms you're tracking on Twitter.

Got some you find helpful? Please share them with us.

Hi,
You have a good list. Google alerts is another mainstay.

We have Techrigy SM2 in both freemium & prof versions. The advantage is that aggregates all of the conversations (including blog comments) into one dashboard & providing analytics for them. It's another tool to try as you get started.

Connie
Community Strategist, Techrigy
@cbensen

Thanks for the list, I added a few new tools to my toolbox.

Question - Have you found any paid services to be truly worth paying for them, vs the variety of free tools that are available?

Thanks for sharing. I agree with Connie on Google Alerts. Many of my alerts are blog posts. Is there an advantage to using Backtype over Google Alerts for this?

Thanks,
Amy Sawade
PR Specialist, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park